A bundle has gone up on itch.io to support two charities serving the Ukrainian victims of the war. The Bundle for Ukraine starts at $10 for almost a thousand games. If you can, paying more than the minimum is possible and all of the proceeds are split 50/50 between the International Medical Corps and Voices of Children.
I’m not sure if they’re happy to have their plans leaked to the press, but it is tremendous news (from last month) that workers at some of Apple’s retail stores are working on unionizing according to Reed Albergotti at the Washington Post:
Employees at several Apple Stores across the country are quietly working to unionize, according to people familiar with the efforts, as growing dissent among hourly workers threatens to disrupt one of the most stolid tech giants.
Groups at at least two Apple retail stores are backed by major national unions and are preparing to file paperwork with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in the near future, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential plans. At least a half dozen more locations are at less-advanced stages in the unionization process, these people say.
A little odd to not mention the security checks that held workers up without pay for years in the article, but otherwise this is such great news.
Tim Cook’s compensation was $98.73 million in 2021, hourly workers at Apple retail stores in the United States earn between $17-$30 an hour or more, which means they’re bringing home between about $25,500 to $45,000 a year. An average 1 bedroom apartment in San Francisco is $3,304 a month according to ApartmentList.com, that’s almost $40k a year on an apartment to live near your work if you’re employed at Apple’s retail store in Union Square.
Tim Cook doesn’t make the products, doesn’t sell them, but he takes the profits for the labor of the people working at these stores and is “thankful” that he gets to exploit their labor as he announces on stage any time he talks about the workers in the stores, factories, and the white collar jobs.
I’ve worked retail, and at tech jobs, and I can tell you that I’ve never had to work harder than when I worked retail jobs. The hours are rough, the pay is miserable, and many of the bigger stores force workers to watch anti-union videos and attend meetings that lie about how unions operate. That seems to be the kind of tactic Apple takes as well, which is incredibly shameful. If Tim Cook is truly thankful to the workers at Apple they should be represented on the board of the company and unionized.
Apple is titling the infomercial “Peek Performance.” Rumored to be there are updates to the iPhone SE, iPad Mini, MacBook Air, and the Mac Mini. The remaining computers that still ship with Intel processors instead of Apple’s M1 series of chips are the Mac Pro and the 27-inch iMac. Here’s the link to Apple’s website for the event. I will have a write-up of it on the day of the infomercial.
Mrs. Nuclear Monster joined me to try out Diner Bros, a co-operative multiplayer game in the style of Diner Dash. We had fun.
The invasion of Ukraine has led to the Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine & Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine (that’s one person, Mykhailo Fedorov) requesting via Twitter that Microsoft’s Xbox division, and Sony’s PlayStation division, in addition to “all game development companies” and “esports platforms”, to temporarily block all games from accounts in Russia and Belarus and cancel esports events in Russia and Belarus:
There are a lot of strong and thoughtful arguments that sanctions are a bad idea, the rich are likely to be easily able to work around them so only the regular people may suffer. Without a democratically elected government how likely is it that further unrest in Russia will result in Vladimir Putin being deposed and this war ending? I don’t know, but I do want peace and it is good to sympathize with the Ukrainians and all victims of war. We will see if Sony, Microsoft, and the rest of the game industry join in on the wave of sanctions.
This isn’t the first request that the Ukrainian government has made via Twitter, they’ve also requested support from other countries, businesses and notably from the name-calling heir to a fortune from apartheid-era mining, Elon Musk. Who may have delivered some internet-providing Star Link satellite dishes but who knows if those worked or if the service can even be moved from one location to another which seems like it might be useful when you’re trying to avoid an invading military force.
